This quietly brilliant play by American playwright Annie Baker makes for gripping viewing in an excellent Catalan adaptation directed by Marilia Samper. At over three hours long (with a short interval), El cine (The Flick) weaves slow magic from the mundane setting of a battered Massachusetts cinema in the early 2010s. It could be the… Read more »
Constant shifts in perspective and playful music and visuals dynamise this Catalan production of English playwright Mike Bartlett’s Love, Love, Love (2010), translated by Cristina Genebat and directed by Julio Manrique. The title is taken from the famous Beatles’ track. The time-leaping production begins in 1967. Kenneth (a self-consciously suave David Selvas) is a 19-year-old Oxford… Read more »
Jeanette Winterson is the Lancashire-raised author of some three-dozen books, from the 1980’s classic Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit to the timely 12 Bytes (2021). Her latest Night Side of the River (October 2023) is a book of 13 original ghost stories told with a signature autobiographical twist. Technical innovation haunts the pieces, as… Read more »
One of Spain’s very first road deaths took place on a hairpin bend in 1927 Ourense, a province of the northwestern region of Galicia. The deceased, one José Fernández España y Vigil, was a civil engineer employed to study the layout of the southern bypass of the railroad – a proposed new section of the… Read more »
There is a story that the renowned fado singer Amália Rodrigues was in a hotel room in New York contemplating suicide; to stave off the depression she watched videos of Hollywood legend Fred Astaire tap dancing. Tap, or at least a style of footwork known as ‘zapateado’ is central to flamenco, but also to the lost… Read more »
Antoni Benaiges was born in 1903 into a Catalan family of rural republicans living in Montroig, Tarragona. He trained as a ‘mestre’, a teacher, and on graduating found work in a mixed school in a tiny village in Bañuelos de Bureba, Burgos. There, in a brief two years, Benaiges quietly revolutionised the lives of the… Read more »
Heavy themes of war, poverty, racial and gender violence are lightly thrown in A Man of Good Hope, a slick musical theatre production in English set in Africa and performed by Cape Town company Isango Ensemble. Based on 2014 book by white academic Jonny Steinberg, it tells the story in song, dance and narration of… Read more »
“In Cádiz where I was born there was a place I loved called Palacio de la Moda. You’d go in and there were mirrors everywhere: on the walls, on the ceiling. You drowned in the spectacle of yourself.” José Troncoso is director of La Estampida, a Spanish theatre collective that burst onto the scene eight… Read more »
The judges at Jocs Florals d’Olot in 1898 reacted in shock when they discovered the author of the prize-winning short story Infanticide was in fact a woman, Catalina Albert i Paradis. It was simply unheard of that one of youth and privilege from the pretty L’Escala in coastal Empordà (Catalonia) could be capable of broaching… Read more »
As the third part in an open-ended trilogy, Made of Space, created by the accomplished Barcelona-based duo Maria Campos and Guy Nader, pushes further (or higher) an ambitious examination of the principles of physics: matter and its motion through space-time, energy, force and the workings of nature. Precision Challenging in its abstract premise, yet open… Read more »
